Why can’t India study black holes? 100 top scientists meet to plug gaps in astrophysics research

Nainital: Astrophysical jets are spectacular things — slender trails of high-speed gas expelled from cosmic bodies like comets. How they work, however, is little understood.


For the first time, over 100 scientists from across the country came together at the

Aryabhatta Research Institute

of Observational Sciences (ARIES) to discuss it on a large scale and, potentially, find answers to the big questions — how are black holes formed and how do they work?


“In India, research in the field has been on for at least two decades. A sizeable number of Indian scientists are working on the subjects, but we still have a lot of catching up to do to be on a par with research at the global level,” Dr Shashi Bhushan Pandey, a scientist at ARIES and co-chair of the five-day workshop told TOI.

What they are trying to decode are the dynamics of astrophysical jets.

“There are three types of jet emission — microblazar,

gamma ray burst

and blazar,” explained Pandey. Microblazars are objects with high luminosity. Gamma ray bursts occur when stars collapse. Blazars are active galactic nuclei, that is, the tight and compact areas with concentrated energy at the centres of galaxies.

“Microblazar bursts are only a few light years (a light year is 9.46 trillion km) in length. Gamma ray bursts are thousands of light years long, while blazar bursts are thousands of parsecs (one parsec is 3.26 light years) long,” said Pandey. “The size of black holes at the centre of these also vary. A microblazar or gamma ray burst has black holes only about 10-15 times the size of the sun. Blazar jets have black holes several thousand or even million times the size of the sun.” In fact, the jets emitted from a blazar has a velocity that is faster than the speed of light.

“If scientists can understand and study the three jets together, it will provide the answers to some of physics’s most profound questions,” ARIES director Prof Dipankar Banerjee said. “The concept goes that if we can understand jet unification at a diverse scale and several questions around them, it will be possible to understand not only the formation of black holes but also their workings.”

The first day of the workshop, being organised to mark 50 years of the department of science and technology and 75 years of Indian Independence, focused on blazar jets and how artificial intelligence can help understand them better. Next, the workshop will go over the other jet emissions and how they could be studied together. “We will also discuss what kind of observation facilities we need to study them in detail. While our existing facilities, like the 5-m DOT Telescope, do provide useful data, a new generation of large observational facilities is also needed in the future,” Pandey said.